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Financing & Financial Services

[Editor's note: The Bangla-Pesa recently celebrated over two years in operation. Below are two videos that describe how this complimentary currency system works and how it has helped business owners in Bangladesh, Kenya to operate more efficiently by providing an alternative to the national currency that is in chronically short supply in impoverished areas like Bangladesh.]

As worker-owners, we’re used to doing things ourselves. We start businesses, figure out democratic decision-making, and confront systemic issues that deny wealth to communities. We’re tenacious and self-governing, so why limit our influence to our workplaces? As our movement grows—and it is, rapidly—we’re innovating faster than the law can keep up, often operating in gray areas that can be as uncertain as they are productive.

Cooperative organizing, development, and technical assistance services are needed in upstate New York. This void has been slowly—very slowly—shrinking for decades. It is hoped that the creation and evolution of the New York Cooperative Network between 2011 a

Matthew Slater sums up his experiences visiting European ecovillages. He considers their strengths and presents questions aimed at addressing the lack of financing and true economic alternatives within the ecovillage movement.

[Editor's note: these two documents from Croatia's EBank (English translation) lay out an alternative type of financial institution for solidarity economy projects and enterprises. While utilizing an ownership structure similar to a credit union (all customers are owner

[Editor's note: this report by Pat Conaty and David Bollier presents an in-depth look at the how our often disparate movements might begin to work together more closely in order to create a more just, open and equitable economy. David Bollier describes the scope of the report on Shareable:

The debate over who lost Detroit and how to fix it rages on while Politico reports in “Break-up-the-big-banks fever hits the states” that legislators from “at least 18 states have introduced resolutions this year calling on Congress to split up banking giants by putting back in place a wall between commercial banking, taking deposits and making loans, and investment banking, the world of traders and deal-makers.” It turns out that quarantining the banksters and salvagi

The Occupy Money Co-operative is getting NY Times coverage as it works its way to actually issuing pre-paid Visa Cards. Drawing smiley-face points from their association with Occupy Wall Street and the Co-operative movement, the initiative paints a comforting picture. I find two things troubling when I go to the Occupy Money Co-op web-site.

Over 125 years ago, the Populist Movement launched a third party in the US and their most compelling platform plank was "greenbacks," the elimination of the rigid gold standard and a freeing up of the money supply. Here we are over a century later and Richard Nixon freed us from the last vestiges of Gold in forty years ago and our central Banksters have expanded the money supply at the behest of Presidents and their Bankster allies.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: In the article below Alberto Corbino gives us a view of the Solidarity Economy movement in Italy. He will be doing a lecture tour in the US this summmer. The idea is to continue discussing the subjects he reports on in the article here at universities, colleges, and centers of solidarity economic justice movements.